Learn About Wine

An Introduction To Wine Varieties So far we’ve discovered how your senses understand wine, looked at wine tasting for beginners, discussed wine faults and off-odors in wine; we’ve done everything but talk about wine itself. So let’s talk about wine. Specifically, let’s talk about wine grapes, wine varieties and wine varietals. Last time, I mentioned that there is a big difference not only between each grape variety, but differences within each variety. And understanding these differences is key to learning about wine and knowing what to expect from a bottle when purchasing wine. Now it’s crazy to think about the ten thousand or so grapes out there classified as Vitis vinifera (that’s the technical word for wine grape). That’s a lot to chew on for a beginner and I wouldn’t be able to name a fraction of those wine grapes anyway–not because I don’t care enough to know them, which I don’t — but that the actual number of wine grapes used in commercial winemaking is only about one thousand. And then only a handful of those grape varieties are used in the production of “fine wine”. There’s some trickle-down grapenomics for you. Naturally, when learning about wine you can [...]

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